Inside Health

A Computer Diagnosis Of Prejudice

By ERICA GOODE

Published: October 13, 1998

Ask people if they have negative attitudes toward blacks, women or the elderly, and you are likely to hear a chorus of denials. But give those same individuals a simple test to tap unconscious beliefs, two psychologists say, and the results often tell a different story.

Prejudice can be so pervasive and so deeply rooted that many people are not consciously aware of their biases, say Dr. Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington and Dr. Mahzarin Banaji of Yale University, developers of the Implicit Associations Test.

The test, a series of word-pairing tasks, is intended to measure implicit or automatic associations to social groups. In one version, subjects are asked to pair random combinations of pleasant and unpleasant words -- ''peace'' and ''paradise'' versus ''hatred'' and ''violence'' -- with combinations of proper names common among white or black Americans -- Brad and Peggy versus Jamal and Latisha. Other versions of the test address unconscious assumptions about women and older people. Still others focus on self-esteem and sex differences in preferences for math or art.

Drs. Greenwald and Banaji and their colleagues have given the test to hundreds of undergraduates, including more than 1,000 Yale freshmen this fall. Thousands of other people are taking the test on line, by visiting a Web site (www.yale.edu/implicit) for the researchers. The site received 50,000 hits in its first week, the researchers said.

In studies using the race-based version of the test, 90 percent of white subjects took longer to pair pleasant words with black names and unpleasant words with white names than the other way around, a delay the psychologists interpret as an automatic or implicit preference for white names.

This discrepancy remained significant even when the researchers took into account the familiarity of the proper names, the order in which the words were presented, whether the pleasant words appeared on the right or left side, and other factors that might influence the results. Data from black subjects are still being collected, but Dr. Greenwald says many black people taking the test also show a preference for white names, though to a weaker degree.

While the test may reveal unconscious prejudice, the researchers note that no evidence links a person's performance on the test with attitudes or behavior in the outside world. ''We like to think of it as an unconsciousness-raising tool,'' Dr. Banaji said, a tool ''for increasing awareness or self-analysis. It should not be used to select individuals for jobs or to select a jury.''